Jiangheng Lu has been a student in Alireza Khaligh’s research group since 2015, and Dr. Khaligh nominated him for the award.

Jiangheng’s research spans several areas of power engineering and energy systems including modeling, simulation, design, and development of power electronics interfaces for electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy systems. His research has led to eight journal papers (six published and two under review) and four conference papers, in addition to a pending U.S. patent. He is currently working on the design, development and verification of a 6.6kW integrated onboard charger using real vehicle specifications from General Motors.

Briefly, here are three of Jiangheng’s research accomplishments. First, he designed two prototypes for high step-down DC/DC converters to power auxiliary loads in electric vehicles: a full bridge DC/DC LLC and a full bridge phase-shift DC/DC converter, which steps down a 400 volt high-voltage battery to 12 volts.

Second, he worked on a challenging NSF project to integrate onboard chargers and auxiliary power modules for electric vehicles. This required deep knowledge not only of power electronic circuits, but also magnetics and control systems. Jiangheng designed and developed a dual output 3.3 kiloWatt onboard charger. With this technology, Khaligh’s group participated in the Department of Energy’s 2017 Allegheny Region Cleantech University Prize Collegiate Competition, and received the 3rd overall place.

Third, in collaboration with another graduate student, Jiangheng proposed an innovative approach to control the power flow and minimize circulating power in a proposed dual output integrated charger. Based on this concept, Khaligh’s group received the University of Maryland’s 2018 Physical Sciences and Overall Top Invention of the Year Award.

Also, Jiangheng was the entrepreneurial lead in a recent NSF i-Corp project, in which he made group presentations and interviewed over 100 individuals and conducted customer discovery and market analyses for the Khaligh group’s technology.

Samuel is a senior in the Mechanical Engineering Department and is minoring in Computer Science. He is a College Park Honors Scholar who is also a Banneker/Key Scholarship recipient and a member of the RISE program.

Samuel was nominated for the award by Sarah Bergbreiter.

Dr. Bergbreiter mentions that Samuel has impressed her “with his initiative, diligence, persistence, and willingness to dive in and learn new things.”

Samuel recently had his first conference paper—as first author—accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2018 after only one summer’s worth of work. He travelled to Brisbane, Australia to present his work. The paper is part of the large AFOSR Nature Inspired Flight Technologies and Ideas (NIFTI) project. ISR faculty on the project include Drs. Bergbreiter, Pamela Abshire, Timothy Horiuchi, Nuno Martins, and Miao Yu.

Samuel designed sensors that take size, weight, power, and computational complexity into account—a significant systems engineering challenge. He repeatedly tried new fabrication approaches and amended his designs based on what was successful. He also took the initiative to contact professors who run the instructional wind tunnel on campus to test these sensors. Dr. Bergbreiter was “beyond impressed with his initiative and ability to follow through on details that other students—even graduate students—would ignore.”

Recently Samuel worked on actuator and general mechanical designs in the Nanoscribe 2-photon photolithography system. He has learned to use this equipment, generated new designs, and tested them. This summer, he was a research intern at MIT, developing a novel platform for 3D tissue culture inspired by soft robotics.